This was the seventh game of a first-round series, and given the grim scene for the home team at TD Garden, it looked like it could also be the final one of more than a few careers in Boston’s black and gold. There was talk around town that Bruins coach Claude Julien could be out of work if his team succumbed to its second consecutive first-round out since its 2011 Stanley Cup. Such is the high standard in championship-bathed New England that Boston forward Milan Lucic said after the game that there was a dressing-room assumption that a Game 7 loss would bring roster upheaval.

But time was getting tight. The Bruins, who once led the best-of-seven series 3-1, had been struggling through a scoring slump. And Boston’s largely wretched history of coughing up their season by squandering big advantages had been well documented in the lead-up to the game. Four of Boston’s previous five playoff runs had ended in Game 7 losses. So what were the odds?

Still, while the Leafs sat back, the Bruins kept coming. With a little more than 10 minutes remaining in regulation, Nathan Horton’s goal began the comeback. Suddenly it was 4-2.

“(The fans) stopped booing us. Suddenly they’re cheering for you — it helps a lot,” Johnny Boychuk, the Bruins defenceman, said with a laugh.

For a while, it still looked like a classic case of too little, too late. The narratives were written. It was only three springs ago that a Boston roster not dissimilar to this one grabbed a 3-0 series advantage in a second-round tilt with the Philadelphia Flyers, only to become the third team in league history to cough up the next four games. For all of Boston’s success during its ongoing six-season post-season streak, the Bruins’ winning percentage in Game 7 was an unimpressive .375 heading into Monday night.

But with the game evaporating into its final two minutes, the Bruins pulled goaltender Tuukka Rask. And Lucic, by force of will, banged in a goal to make it 4-3.

“I remember saying to the guys in the huddle, ‘One more! You never know. You never know,’ ” Lucic would say.

And the truth is, you never do know. If you listened local sports-talk radio in the lead-up to the game, Boston coach Claude Julien was taking a near-death verbal beating by the local experts.

Yes, Julien was the same man behind the bench when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup less than two calendar years ago. But no, that ring did not grant Julien immunity from rampant criticism that he hadn’t been proactive enough in mixing and matching struggling lines.

“Before you start blowing things up, you’ve got to have a little patience,” Julien had said before the game. “Patience has been good for us in the past.”

Still, Julien lost patience in Game 7, swapping Jaromir Jagr into a trio with Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand. Tyler Seguin, who’d gone without a point in six playoff games skating alongside the latter two, took Jagr’s spot on the third line with Rich Peverley and Chris Kelly. Whether those moves would be seen as strategic genius or futile juggling would clearly lie in the result.

“As much as you hate tearing that line apart, (Bergeron’s line) hadn’t been producing, so we made the switch,” Julien said.

When Bergeron scored Boston’s second 6-on-5 goal with 51 seconds to play for the 4-4 tie, the TD Garden crowd showered the ice in yellow spirit towels and erupted into an ovation that lasted a long moment and then some. It was bedlam. It was the NHL’s drama kings at their down-to-the-last-breath best.

“I don’t know why we can’t play that way all game,” Dougie Hamilton, the rookie defenceman, said. “We joked about that after — maybe we should play with our goalie pulled all game.”

Added Lucic of the final minutes of regulation, when the Bruins rose and the Leafs shrunk: “It seemed like we just started to play more reckless. I just said, ‘Screw it. Leave everything on the line, and hopefully everything will take care of itself.’ ”

When Bergeron scored a little more than six minutes into overtime, there was bedlam again on Causeway Street. There were recollections of a Stanley Cup run that began with a round one Game 7 overtime win over Montreal. There were more than a handful of players who said they’d never played in a crazier game.

“We found a way,” said Bergeron. “Everyone has to step up in the playoffs and tonight was my turn to do it for my team.”

So much for the scoring slump. And so much for Julien’s tinkering. Though Bergeron had spent much of the game playing with Jagr and Marchand and even occasionally Horton, a quirk of fate saw the decisive goal assissted by Seguin and Marchand — the same trio that had combined for an outrage-inducing three points in the first six games. Jagr and Horton, it turned out, had been off having a skate malfunction repaired.

“Same old three guys on the ice for the winning goal,” Julien said. “A little bit by accident.”

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.